Tag: Magu

AS his confirmation screening before the Senate drew near, Ibrahim Magu, boss of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), worked tirelessly, lobbied furiously, spoke conciliatorily, and waited with bated breath to see what fate had in store for him. He had done his best; he could do no more. In the end, more than six months after his name was forwarded by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo to the Senate, Mr Magu came to grief in a dramatic, almost predictable fashion. His kinsman in the Senate, Senator Ali Ndume, fought bravely to get him confirmed. The Senate would have none of it. Based on security reports authored by the Department of State Service (DSS), growled the Senate, Mr Magu was too compromised to be effective in that sensitive beat. The fate of the anti-graft boss was thus sealed in an executive session without him saying a word in his own defence.

Theoretically, Mr Magu’s name can be represented by President Muhammadu Buhari once certain remedies are introduced. But given the circumstances leading to the anti-graft czar’s rejection at the hands of exultant and sniggering senators late last week, the president is unlikely to bother. It speaks volumes that the president himself did not forward the name of Mr Magu when there was no complication or any technicality barring him from doing so. He left that controversial and thankless job to Professor Osinbajo. The president could also have lobbied fiercely to get Mr Magu confirmed, especially given the fact that the country was abuzz with plans by powerful interests inside and outside the Senate to scuttle the confirmation. The president chose to be aloof, hiding behind the magisterial sentiment of letting institutions do their work professionally.

Shortly before his Senate debacle, Mr Magu must have sensed that he was virtually alone in the task of securing confirmation. True, he had a few top legislators and officials behind and beside him, but it was nothing compared to the forces his enemies had mustered. And enemies he had aplenty. This column, strangely, was not one of them. It had shown reservations about how the anti-graft boss performed his functions, and on one or two occasions written harshly about his coarse methods, some of which taunted the rule of law, mocked common sense, and frayed national sensibilities. But it suggested that the passion Mr Magu brought to the job, not to say his apparent patriotic glow, should earn him the confirmation. On another occasion, the column suggested exasperatingly that though Mr Magu’s confirmation was a foregone conclusion, the Senate should grill him intensively and extract a promise to abide by the rule of law.

It is, therefore, regrettable that Mr Magu has been dealt a devastating blow. He is unlikely to be represented to the Senate, and he is unlikely to continue working in the EFCC. There is no one to save him, though he would have been a rather competent czar of the organisation. Though his enemies were plentiful and adequately mobilised and motivated, what did him in was not whether he ran the EFCC competently or not, or whether they loved him in the Senate or not. He was unhorsed by the same forces that prop up the Buhari government he serves. He was done in from within, not from without. He belonged to the wrong camp, even though ineluctable fate made it impossible for him to belong to the right camp; and there was, alas, nothing he could do to remedy that unsavoury fact.

Top officials of the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption (PACAC), including its chairman, Professor Itse Sagay, prefer to blame the legislature for Mr Magu’s woes. They are wrong. If Mr Magu had not first been smothered in the president’s kitchen cabinet, the Senate would have had a hard time burying him. Mr Magu doubtless had few friends in the legislature — given the lawmakers’ reckless proclivity for corruption and fondness for unethical shortcuts — and even fewer friends anywhere else, considering how corruption had eaten deep into the national fabric. But his nemesis should be located squarely in the president’s kitchen cabinet where the anti-graft boss was a loathed outsider. Many civil society groups have also suggested that Mr Magu came a most appalling cropper because corruption was fighting back. This silly refrain masks terrible undercurrents in the seat of government, much of which even now remains a deep mystery.

Yet, on the surface, it is difficult to ignore the official reasons given for Mr Magu’s misery. He had had a running battle with top shots of the DSS, with the two security and anti-graft organisations at sixes and sevens. A day or two after the DSS enacted their spectacular raids on the residences of some eight top judges, including two Supreme Court justices, and reporters were wondering whether the service had not crossed into the domain of the anti-graft agency, a secret service spokesman sneeringly told the media that the EFCC was too tainted to organise the raids. It was not until last week that Nigerians received substantiation for that objurgatory dismissal. According to the DSS security report cited by the Senate to disqualify Mr Magu, the anti-graft boss lived a double life, tainted life of luxury, engaged in financial dalliance with corrupt people, and made himself liable to be bought and kept. They cited names, figures and facts. The Senate took so much perverse delight in the report that it was unwilling to even give Mr Magu a hearing. It appeared to everyone involved — the powerful DSS that had the ear of the president, and the Senate that had the legislative powers to vet Mr Magu — that the anti-graft boss had been abandoned to the wolves. The story of how Mr Magu united his enemies against himself may not have been fully told yet. Certainly, it goes beyond the fight against corruption or corruption fighting back.

Some eminent lawyers have asked the DSS report to be made public. The media has done that already. But neither the Senate nor the DSS, nor yet the presidency, will deign to answer questions from anyone on how and why they bumped off their chief enemy. The fight has been won and lost. On the whole, what is emerging is that corruption is much more entrenched than first believed. In addition, it is clear that the reason for the war between the forces arraigned on both sides of Mr Magu has little to do with extirpating corruption or finding a better replacement for the anti-graft boss. There is nothing altruistic about the turf war between the agencies; and there is little to give anyone hope that a better and more efficient person can be found to head the EFCC. After all, Mr Magu’s nemesis, the DSS, is itself being run more like a Gestapo than a constitutional, accountable organ designed to protect the nation from internal subversion.

But if anyone thinks that the anticipated departure of Mr Magu will bring about a rapprochement between the EFCC and DSS, that person is an incurable optimist. The bitter, snarling rivalry will continue. But more than any of the armed or security services, the DSS will always have the ear of the president. It will be closest to him, not just because the president has put his kinsman at its head, but because of the peculiar nature of the secret service and their indispensability to the president’s safety and his government’s security. For now, the DSS boss, the imperious Lawal Daura, and the Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, agree. Notwithstanding their own faults, their synergy will mean much to President Buhari whose government is now obviously and disturbingly riven by conflicts, rivalries and unhealthy competitions.

Mr Magu may have come to grief, and the country, including this column, may be sad to see him go, but it is doubtful whether in the light of the controversy swirling around the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Babachir David Lawal, there is anyone left who thinks an incorruptible person exists anywhere inside or outside the government, especially inside. (See Box) If the accommodation scandal attributed to Mr Magu and his acolytes is established to be a true reflection of the facts on the ground, then, truly, the people and the government must begin to despair.

Prof Sagay says no one can push Mr Magu out, and that if need be, he could continue in office in acting capacity. It is not clear whether the eminent professor made the statement after the publication of the DSS report. No constitution empowers anyone to stay in acting capacity interminably, for that would undermine the duty of the Senate to screen and confirm or reject a nominee. Except President Buhari experiences an epiphany and decides to back Mr Magu, the web spun around the anti-graft boss in the presidency is so tight that it is hard to see him breathing, let alone functioning. It is also hard indeed to see the president defying a conspiracy perfected between the DSS and the National Assembly. For if the president has experienced any epiphany at all, it is the realisation that most of those who surround him, not to say officials who are far removed from him, are embroiled in one corruption controversy or the other. If the president thinks himself a good man, he must by now be convinced that to find just one more person like him is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

The Senate’s increasing assertiveness, if its less than altruistic side is peeled off, is a positive spinoff from the Magu controversy, and a natural consequence of the many months the presidency assailed key figures of the National Assembly either through the courts or by simply railing against them with unprintable epithets. The legislature is becoming more confident to check the excesses of the executive and vet their policies. Had the presidency been able to instigate a march on the legislature as it seemed dangerously poised to do in the giddy early days of the anti-corruption war, this salient and salutary role would have been buried under the canopy of sycophancy or lost altogether. Reassuringly, the legislature is now asserting itself, and may, despite its own greed and incompetence, inadvertently help to consolidate the principles and practice of democracy if Nigerians can somehow find the selflessness and discipline to elect the right lawmakers. But for Mr Magu, the war may already be lost.